VS Code Is Ghostwriting Your Git History Without Permission
The signal: VS Code is automatically injecting Co-Authored-by: GitHub Copilot into git commit metadata even when developers haven't used Copilot on that code.
Why it matters: Your git history is a legal and professional record — who authored what matters for IP ownership, client contracts, and open source licensing. Having an AI silently claim co-authorship on code it never touched pollutes that record in ways that could bite you later.
The pattern I'm watching: This is the slow creep of AI attribution being baked into tooling at the infrastructure level, normalizing AI co-authorship before anyone's had a serious legal conversation about what it means. Microsoft gets training signal and brand visibility; you get liability ambiguity.
What I'd do with this: Audit your recent commits right now — check git log --format=full for any surprise co-authors. If you're shipping to clients or contributing to open source, add a git hook that strips or flags these injections before they land in your repo.
You're receiving this because you subscribed to The Vin Patel Dispatch — one AI signal a day.